Mozilla prepares second Firefox 4 beta launch

Cute little heartbreaker

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The second beta of Firefox 4 is tentatively set to land tomorrow and ahead of that Mozilla has been asking testers to offer feedback about the open source outfit’s latest browser.

On Monday Mozilla ran some tests for the Firefox 4 beta 2 code freeze. It found four low-risk bugs still present in the build, but none of those were enough to put a hold on proceedings, according to Mike Beltzner.

However, he later urged a little more caution about the next beta.

Here’s where things stand:

- bug 557225 resulted in less-than-ideal hangs on startup on OSX; bsmedberg is currently testing a fix

- bug 580227 was filed for Test Pilot which wasn't fixed after the XPCOM changes; a patch is awaiting review from dtownsend

- bug 579262 remains, but at this point I don't think we'll block beta2 on it, instead adding a release note; visible regression on some YouTube videos, though, so people may have opinions that they wish to share on that score

He added that there were also two non-code related bugs to fix in the second pre-release version of Firefox 4.

Meanwhile, Mozilla called on web surfers running the first beta of Firefox 4 to get involved in a “Test Pilot” study.

“This study will explore the ways users interact with the Firefox menu bar, Firefox button (on Windows Vista and 7), and toolbar controls in the main window. By understanding how users commonly interact with these controls, we will be able to streamline and simplify the user interface in Firefox 4 Beta,” said Mozilla.

A third beta of Firefox 4 is penciled in for 6 August. A release candidate build will tentatively follow in October, said Mozilla.

The full rundown of what was baked into the first beta of Firefox 4 is here. ®